The robot’s body is stiff near the core control center, making it durable enough to be combustion-powered, while the bot’s flexible outer edges help it stick the landing.

Scientists hope that soft robots inspired by flexible animals like snakes and sea creatures will be more resilient than “traditional” metal robots. But soft robots are hard to build because hard and soft parts need to be molded separately and then assembled. The 3-D printing technique Wood’s team used gets around the need for manual assembly, and could pave the way for a new generation of bouncing, controllable robots.

Since these bots have squishy parts, they can navigate terrain hard robots can’t. They might be safer for close contact with people and could even be used to delicately manipulate organs in surgery—though, of course, Wood says, these tasks would require the development of robots not powered by combustion.

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